On Tuesday, May Day, I was up early after a halfway decent night’s sleep. I felt I was well enough to get the seed starting done. When my helper arrived at 7:45 we took the car down to get new tires.
I had gotten mostly set up for the seed starting before she got there.
I still had several seeds to record before she could plant them, but was able to finish them while she filled pots. She had gotten 1 tray planted by the time the car was ready to pick up at 9AM so we went and brought it home.
Once I’d finished my job at the table, I helped with filling pots and watering them down. Last year this seed mix was new and easy to work with. But it was shipped in woven sacks vs the plastic bags from the previous company and over the year they dried out. Now it’s very hard to work with and makes an awful dusty mess everywhere.
Soon the dining window and the south porch window were full.
This is what we started:
Melons 9
Peppers:
Sweet 6
Kapiya 6
Paprika 6
Tomatoes:
Standard tomatoes 6
Paste tomatoes 6
Cherry tomatoes 3
Borage 6
Elecampane 6
Yellow Toothache 12
Allyssum 6
California Poppy 6
Cosmos 6
Lobelia 6
Marigolds 30
Portulaca 9
Zinnia 6
Total: 132 in 8 trays
We didn’t quite fill the roundtop window this time. The office window is still empty.
We also had 3 pots of liatris that had been in the fridge for a month and we planted those in a pot in the South garden. Then we cleaned up the awful mess inside.
Then my helper went down to the cellar and swept up the mess from moving the sandbox and got the crocks back into the old root cellar.
New Herb garden after all the rain
May Day on the farm 2023
Trees leafing out
My helper still had an hour left and it had stopped raining. The daylilies and iris needed to move to the West Shed garden that was ready for them.
I broadforked and dug a trench along the back while my helper started trying to dig the daylilies. They had loved being in the Small garden after years in gravely soil. Their root systems were enormous! It took 2 of us to get each clump out. This soil isn’t as good as the Small garden’s but it’s a lot better than what they were in.
We ran out of time to move the iris. Maybe on Thursday if it’s not raining.
I had an early nap and got to bed by 8PM. I’m still coughing a bit and not back to what passes as normal yet. On Tuesday my helper friend is here but it’s supposed to rain all day. I’d started a list of inside stuff to do when I saw we were to have a week of rain. There’s house plants to feed and cleaning to do. I will also probably have him make me a soup of some sort too.
Wow! The garden is looking alive and good again! Rain! We need rain badly! Send half your rain to us in Nongkhai!
You did so many kinds of seeds. I will have to make a list of all the plants I bought during the last three months. I’m waiting for the rainy season to start so that I could plant them in the big garden.
Hope you get all your strength back soon! Take it easy!
You managed to get a lot done in one day. Moving daylilies can be quite the chore in itself. We have had three days of rain and everything is sopping wet. I did manage to up-pot all my peppers into larger pots to grow on. I will probably post later this week. Happy May!
This is really lovely to behold. You are doing a whole lot of work within a day. Wow! You must be really energetic!
There are varieties of plants here, and it's wonderful to see that you pay attention to their special needs.
So sorry about your cough, i believe with more rest you'd be better and stronger to continue the task ahead.
By the way, are you participating in the Threads Adoption Campaign that just started? The Prize Pool is $10,000, and you can also win 100k Hive Power for representing the HiveGarden Community. I hope you'll participate in it, if you havent already. You can check here to join, and I'll be glad to answer your questions.
Hello lovely lady! 😊
Have you thought of watering down the soil before putting it into the pots, to cut down on dust, etc...? Just a thought, it might not work, but could be worth a try if you have lots of the dusty soil left. 😊
We got another tray of our tomatoes and peppers started this week and yesterday we got to up-plant/transplant a few of the peppers we planted a couple weeks ago. If all the peppers and tomatoes that we planted come up, we should have an amazing selection of crops to choose from. We're looking forward to seeing all the different colours, sizes and shapes of the new peppers and tomatoes we picked up this spring. Hopefully, I'll have my phone with me when they start popping out and I'll get some good pictures to post too. 😊
Your garden beds are all looking great, happy, healthy and fruitful. I'm looking forward to seeing your Daylilies and Irises in bloom again. They'll have some gorgeous colours for you, (and us through your posts,) to enjoy soon. 😊
God bless you and your wonderful family. Have an awesome day my fabulous friend! 😊
It would raise enough dust transferring it to a container to wet down, then trying to mix the water into it. Amounts to the same thing in the end. Just wish they'd use plastic to package, as much as I hate to add to the plastic stream.
They should pack it in paper, like they do the wood shaving bricks, that's biodegradable, and you can soak the soil inside the paper in a tote or whatnot, then rip it open to get to the moist soil inside and plant away. 😊